1 Derrida and the Philosophy of Deconstruction * Thomas Khurana I. The Philosophy of Deconstruction The philosophical reception of deconstruction poses a paradox. On the one hand, an immense amount of articles and books have been published on deconstruction, and Derrida is certainly among the most cited philosophers of the 20th century. In addition, Derrida’s work has influenced some of the most impactful, philosophically relevant transdisciplinary endeavors of the past decades: among them gender studies, post-colonial studies, a new type of approach to comparative literature, critical legal studies, science and media studies. Yet, in many ways the reception of Derrida as a philosopher still seems to lie ahead of us. 1 The dominant response to Derrida’s work, whether affirmative or critical, has been to understand it as some form of anti-philosophy. This is true of the great appreciation Derrida has won in various non-philosophical disciplines across the humanities, as well as in the harsh rejection of his works by analytic philosophers in particular. This response to his works is not altogether surprising, given that the early Derrida articulated his philosophical endeavor as a radical critique of metaphysics and identified metaphysics with the whole philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel and beyond. But it still seems baffling that his critique of metaphysics has been understood as an attempt to leave philosophy behind. Few authors have so intensely and passionately devoted themselves to the texts of the philosophical tradition, and even fewer have so vigorously trusted those texts to contain the actual truth about themselves. The fact that these texts express this truth, against and despite themselves, does not change the fact that, on Derrida’s account, no one else could be trusted to speak this truth—except these philosophical texts. The truth about philosophy cannot be revealed by sociological, psychological, economic, literary, or cultural analysis, but only by a mobilization of these philosophical texts (against) themselves. In unfolding this mobilization, Derrida is explicit from the start, that his aim is not to leave behind the tradition he critically engages. On Derrida’s diagnosis, all those who have tried to leave metaphysics behind in a gesture of simple rejection or supersession, have remained firmly entrapped within it, whether they knew it or not. Challenging the metaphysical form that has distorted and obfuscated philosophical truth can only happen from within and requires giving up the fantasy of escaping philosophy and its metaphysical temptations. Acknowledging this does not lead to a weaker, but, in Derrida’s terms, to a more radical critique of the philosophical tradition. * Forthcoming in Karen Ng, Sacha Golob (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Continental Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.